Effects of mechanical conditions on tearing characteristics of zipper band made of white-clay-coated paperboard (Dependency of tearing characteristics on length of connecting portions, width of band and pulling direction)

Abstract

Coated-recycled paperboard is considered to be a fundamental material for the packaging industry due to its advantages such as high strength-to-weight ratio, high surface smoothness, printability, sustainability, recyclability, and so on. To convert paperboard into a packaging container, a raw paperboard is first printed at a printing line. Then, it is subjected to cutting and creasing processes (Kirwan, 2013). The stripped blank is folded and glued to obtain a packaging carton, the structure of which is designed in several styles (Kirwan, 2013). For examples, there are a seal end, tuck top auto bottom, tuck end, sleeve, lock corner tray, walker lock tray (All packaging company, 2016). Since a closed packaging box is considered to be easily or smoothly opened by customers, a sort of tearing band (zipper pull tab), which is formed in the die-cutting process, is often designed and implemented on the packaging box flap. The zipper band for opening a box flap normally consists of two parallel dashed lines, which are perforation for tearing. Although such a zipper band is widely used for opening a sealed carton, there seemed to be not any standardized cutting patterns of zipper band yet. There are empirically various cutting patterns of zipper band for each manufacturer. However, there are not any public designing methods and theoretical discussion on mechanics of tearing characteristics of zipper band. Regarding the failure behavior of paper, the mode III tear test as the Elmendorf test is known and standardized